Animal Kingdom (15 page)

Leckie saw he was close to where he wanted him to be. ‘I will arrest you if I have to,' he said.

‘What for?' J asked.

Glancing at the stubby in front of him, Leckie answered, ‘Under-age drinking.'

‘Oh, gimme a fuckin' break,' J said, more exasperated than angry.

But if he'd thought about it, he would have realised this was the first half-friendly conversation he'd had with anyone for a while. Leckie had been working his magic and J wasn't frightened of him in the way that he was frightened of his own family, and even almost liked him. Maybe in the way he'd liked Baz. There was something solid about Leckie: you felt like you knew where you stood. He wasn't as friendly as Baz, a little cooler and more distant—professional—but J didn't feel like Leckie wanted to take a bite out of him.

‘You want me to make a scene?' Leckie asked.

J didn't, not here, and so stood and followed him to the car outside.

What he didn't know was that Nicky was crying in the girls' toilet, and what he couldn't foresee was that she'd go around to his place looking for him a little while later, or what would happen then.

Pope was there, sitting in his spider web, waiting to see who might drop in.

‘Is J here?' Nicky asked, quiet and sad, as he answered the door.

‘No, J, he's … he's gone down the shops,' he lied. He hadn't needed to lie. He could have said he didn't know where J was but lying just came naturally to him. ‘But, um, come in. Come and wait for him if you want,' he continued, letting his gaze wander over her. And didn't she look scrummy in her halter top and denim shorts? ‘He won't be long,' he finished.

Darren was playing a computer game in the lounge, but when he heard Nicky at the door, he swore under his breath and put it away as she came in.

‘Have a seat,' Pope said.

‘Did he say how long he'd be?' Nicky asked.

‘Uh, no,' Pope answered, ‘but he won't be long.'

Darren wondered what Pope was up to.

‘Where you been tonight?' Pope asked, sitting down.

‘Just down the bowling alley,' she said.

‘The bowling alley?' Pope asked. ‘Was there anyone there you know? You talk to anyone you know?'

It was hard, sometimes, with Pope. You didn't know whether he wanted to know something in particular or if he was just generally nosy. Usually it was the latter, but he'd always be able to find some way of using it against you later.

‘There was nobody there that I knew,' Nicky answered, too innocent to be worried by his questions.

She should have been picking up the vibe, but she wasn't, because she didn't come from a world where everyone was out to get you most of the time. She had been protected from that by her mother and Gus, but she didn't know that. She thought bad people only existed on TV.

Darren was tense and unfriendly, looking for an opportunity to tell her to get the fuck out of all their lives.

Pope was on edge as well, under that calm, almost friendly surface. On edge like he was trying to work something out.

‘Oh well,' he said, ‘I was about to have a shot. But, ah …' He looked at her. ‘You want some?'

Darren couldn't believe it. They were trying to blow the bitch off and here he was asking her if she wanted a shot.

Nicky could see his kit laid out on the messy coffee table in front of him. ‘What is it?' she asked, interested.

Picking up the needle, Pope flicked it professionally a couple of times, answering, ‘Oh, it's fun.'

Darren wanted her out of there. ‘Better not,' he said. ‘J wouldn't like it if he came in and saw you doing that stuff.'

‘Fuck him,' she shot back defiantly.

‘It's fun, have some,' Pope said, and, before she knew it, he was kneeling down in front of her, saying, ‘Go ahead, come on. Put your arm out.'

She was both fascinated and repelled.

‘Come on,' he said, sticking the needle into her skin.

She couldn't believe this was happening. She'd seen stuff on TV, and read about it—how it was supposed to be bad for you, and stuff—but she'd never seen it for real, like it was now, with a needle inside her arm.

‘There you go. That's it,' he said, and it was done. He could have been taking a splinter out of her thumb, only he wasn't.

It didn't take more than a couple of seconds for her to get the rush and then start to wobble. She was awake—her eyes were wide with surprise or shock; Darren wasn't sure which—but she wasn't saying anything as the drug slammed down her veins into every part of her body,
bang
, like a punch. And then she started to nod.

Pope was watching her carefully, close, almost like a lover. ‘Have you been talking to the cops?' he asked quietly.

She didn't know what he was talking about and, lifting her eyes, slurred, ‘What? About what?'

‘About anything,' Pope answered in that same quiet, sympathetic tone.

‘No,' she said. ‘It's none of my business.'

‘Yeah, yeah, it's your business, isn't it?' Pope tempted.

Darren was getting fidgety. He didn't know what the fuck Pope was on about, but he didn't like it.

Pope continued, ‘When you're in love with someone and you're whispering sweet nothings in their ears …'

She was slipping under now and he shook her to keep her awake, slapping her face as he ordered, ‘Hey! Look at me, look at me.' She was already too fucked to do anything but surrender to it as Pope continued, ‘I got a call from someone who told me that you been talking to the cops.'

Nicky was starting to get scared, but she couldn't have even walked to the front door. She couldn't have even gotten up off the lounge suite. ‘What cops?' she asked slowly.

‘Down at the bowling alley,' Pope said.

Darren didn't know if he was making it up or not. Sometimes Pope would say things like that just to see what you said. What you might let slip. Had she been talking to the cops? How did Pope know?

‘You can tell me,' Pope repeated, looking into her eyes as they went in and out of focus. ‘You been talking to the cops, haven't you?'

‘No,' she said, trying to put her arm out to steady herself.

But, putting his arm around her, Pope pulled her towards him, saying, ‘Come here, come here, baby.'

What the fuck was he doing? Darren felt sick with fear.

‘Come here, baby,' Pope said again.

Every part of her wanted to resist, but she couldn't, and, reaching out, Pope put the palm of his hand over her mouth and started to press in.

‘Pope. Pope, what the fuck are you doing?' Darren said.

‘No …' she blurted, getting a bit of fight in her as she realised what was happening.

‘Let her go, Pope,' Darren cried, paralysed in his own seat on the other side of the coffee table.

She was struggling. She knew he was killing her.

‘Stop it, Pope! Stop!' Darren cried impotently. Where was Smurf? What could he do? ‘Pope. Pope!' he called, trying to bring his brother back from the precipice as he casually murdered a young woman in front of him.

She was fighting it, crying a muffled ‘No … No …' Her eyes were starting from her head. But, slowly losing consciousness, she was going down.

Pope was shoving his palm so hard into her mouth that he broke off one of her teeth.

‘Please, Pope, stop it, please,' Darren pleaded impotently. And then from the depths of their past, from the depths of their shared innocence, long since abandoned, Darren cried, ‘Andrew, please.'

Andrew, his real name, the name that you might be able to appeal to him under. But Andrew was long gone. Andrew didn't exist any more. All that existed was Pope.

And all that existed of Pope at that moment was his voice. ‘Shh, shh …' he whispered into her unhearing ears as she slipped away, like he was putting her to sleep, to gentle, restful sleep instead of killing her. This was the closest he would ever come to tenderness, the closest he would ever come to intimacy. This was his idea of sex: sex with the dead. He was a necrophiliac, and this was his world.

Rising from her, he started to breathe again.

And then something strange and inexplicable happened to him. As if even he was overwhelmed by what he'd just done, some foul, evil thing seemed to take possession of him. Rolling away, almost staggering, like some broken, deformed thing, he glanced at Darren, jeering, ‘There you are, you've gone and done it again, haven't you, Darren?'

Darren was still whimpering, catatonic with horror.

‘You've smoked yourself silly,' Pope taunted, ‘and think something's going on.'

Did he really think Darren would swallow that? Did he really think such a pathetic denial of the obvious truth was a defence?

Pope wanted to show that it was someone else's fault. It was always someone else's fault.

Her lifeless body lay twisted on the couch, still warm, but growing colder by the minute. He had taken her into his kingdom, and she was dead.

J didn't know where they were going. Norris, Leckie's offsider, the flabby, mean one, was driving, keeping an eye on him in the rear-vision mirror, but they weren't going anywhere J recognised. Somewhere in the south. He looked out into the dark suburban streets, and could hear the music and see the flickering lights of the TV sets inside the houses they passed. What were people watching? What were they imagining was happening in the world? Which world was real: his or theirs?

When the police car finally pulled in to a small, secluded motel hidden behind some bushes a few streets back from the highway, J asked, ‘Why'd you bring me here?'

Opening the door into a modest room and ushering him in, Leckie answered, ‘For your own safety.'

J didn't know what that meant and wondered if they knew something he didn't from their surveillance of Pope and Darren. Or maybe they just wanted to have him to themselves somewhere Ezra couldn't find him for a few days. It suited J, even if it was just for the change.

Whatever they knew, they didn't know that Nicky had been murdered by Pope, or that he had dumped her body under some cardboard boxes down the side of the house till he got around to getting rid of it later.

And neither did J. All he knew was that the walls were closing in around him and the ropes were getting tighter.

The cops were weird. Quiet. J had never spent much time with police and he was jumpy. He trusted Leckie, sort of. He didn't think he was going to hurt him, anyhow. Not now. Or, if he was, he was the sort of bloke who'd oversee it, supervise. He wasn't a thumper. Norris was a thumper. Maybe that's why they were a team. Everyone had their specialty. J guessed that Leckie was the brains, the one that'd wear you down.

Sometimes J had wondered what it would be like to be arrested, interrogated. He remembered someone telling him one time—it might even have been his Grandfather Donny, when he was still alive—telling him when he was maybe six or seven that all you have to do if they get you is think of how proud everyone will be when you walk away not having spilled the beans.
You gotta think of the good times ahead
, he could remember him saying,
not the shit happening now
. He wasn't sure if Donny would have said
shit
to a six year old but that's the way he remembered it. He had never grassed on anyone, even if it was some shitty little thing, and he didn't want to start now, especially not on his family.

People like Donny and Smurf, they'd done it tough, there was no question about it. Donny had gone to the war, been a soldier somewhere, never had much, and what he'd had he'd worked for or fought for. The same with Smurf: that's what had made her tough, and resilient. Because if you're not both those things you don't survive. She didn't understand the modern world and she didn't like it, and that's what J was thinking about that night.

How none of them actually lived in the world any more.

He'd read one time that there's this thing around us, like an aura, that you can take a photo of. You can take a photo of your aura. And it's not, like,
ooga-booga
or anything supernatural; it's like a little layer of air that your body makes, a little skin that we have around us, and every living thing has one. Everything—fish, birds, snails—everything has this little layer, this aura, around them, because what everything's trying to do is create its own mini-environment. That's the point. We're trying to make our own little environment to make ourselves feel comfortable.

And that's what Donny and Smurf and the boys had done. They'd made their own environment, and they were so successful at it that they'd lost touch with the rest of the world—it just didn't exist any more for them, except like this phantom that they felt more and more distant from. And as they had grown more distant from it, it had grown more distant from them.

The world had moved on; the days when you could walk into a bank and say
Stick 'em up
were long gone. Even criminals needed an education now.

So people like his family were an anachronism, a throwback to an earlier time when people
did
have to stick together to survive, and
did
have to be good with their fists to hold on to what was theirs.

But that world was gone. Those men, those women for whom Anzac wasn't just a biscuit-tin memory were finished; the world of
us against the coppers, backs against the wall, boys
was over and what was left was a place people like Pope and Smurf hardly even recognised, and didn't have any future in. J was starting to see that, sort of, and wondered where it left him.

Well, where it left him was sitting in a motel with two police silently eating their Chinese takeaways, everyone mulling their own thoughts and worried what the night would bring.

When he was woken the following morning by water being flicked at him by Norris, he wondered what the hell was going on.